Last year was satisfyingly productive for our studio. New clients with technical challenges helped us finish the year with a more complete and rich portfolio. Here’s a quick recap.

HTML5 Licensable games

Part of our activity as studio consists on developing HTML5 games to be licensed to game portals, or game apps. The 3 licensable titles developed this year include a chess game and 2 puzzle games.

These titles were developed keeping in mind the youngest audiences. Nevertheless when they shine the most is when played together by kids and their parents. Each of these games can be a good tool to teach stuff about animals, chess and logical puzzles.

This area of business is something we definitely want to improve in the current year, so expect lots of new licensable games for all audiences!

Electronic gambling (slots)

Back in 2014 we published Pocahontas Slots, a just for fun slots machine with no actual transactions. Having this prior experience in gambling games got us a new commission in 2017. In this new project we were introduced to safe server communications and the Provably Fair system. The gambling world is truly a whole dimension of new tips and tricks.

Game development for major gaming portals

Once again we had the chance of collaborating with two major companies in the field of online games. Both of the developed games were starred by female yet radically different characters. On one side, our fourth game for Spil Games was a cooking game featuring Barbara, a gentle and hardworking baker. On the other side, a kinky clicker game developed for Minijuegos where you play the role of a Youtuber’s psycho fan.

Multiplayer games for Directi

In 2017 the Indian based IT company Directi launched their game platform called Kapow. Since they chose HTML5 as main technology for their platform, Ravalmatic was the right match for this venture.

We had the chance of producing 3 multiplayer games for them during this year. These set of games were our first contact with a turn-based multiplayer design. After dozens of games where we just cared about the client side, working on the server side too was a rich experience for all of us as a team. This is a path we will love to walk by again in 2018.

We are confident that this current year will increase our portfolio with new challenging projects. It’s just January, but have finished already a couple of games, and are working on 5 more projects. Looks like next year’s recap will be an even longer post!

http://www.ravalmatic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/2017_games.jpg512512Javi Sanzhttp://www.ravalmatic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ravalmatic_logo.pngJavi Sanz2018-01-27 18:30:462018-01-28 17:16:55Recap of our games in 2017

While some of our clients want to produce their own taylor-made games, they’re not always familiar with the actual costs of producing a game from scratch. Depending on the client needs it could be faster and cheaper reSkinning an existing game. Read more

We’ve been implementing Git for quite a while on our HTML5 games projects and we love its code management possibilities and its collaborative features.

Using Git with the command line is too hard for us, that’s why we need a client. Until recently we were using SourceTree. SourceTree is a great product and it’s free, however there were 2 things we don’t like. First, the theme is white as siberian snow, and our tired programmer eyes really favour a dark theme. Second, SourceTree seems to work better on Mac than Windows. That’s why we’ve decided to test the free version of GitKraken.

The team of programmers developing each of our game projects usually consists just on 1 or 2 guys, so the free version is enough for our current needs.

GitKraken is based in Electron. It’s coded in javascript and uses html and css, which means it’s cross platform. Its GUI besides being nifty, is dark. Fonts are nice and the icons and its diagrams makes it easy and intuitive to use. Branching, stashing or checking out a branch just requires one click.

Do you already have your own favourite Git client? Have you also suffered from white backgrounds and bleeding eyes?

We love to code HTML5 games and JavaScript is a nice programing language but unfortunately everyone can access to the source code of our games. And that includes those cheeky guys who doesn’t want to respect existing license agreements or those just looking for “inspiration” for their next cloned game.

Jscrambler is quite intuitive and it’s web based. There are some other javascript obfuscators but JScrambler offers the most complete and secure solution. Its version 4 has just been released. According to Pedro Fortuna, CTO of JScrambler:

“Version 4 brings the product from a code protection solution to a platform that provides a tamper-proof environment to the application, making sure it is executed without interferences and by legitimate users only.”

We’d like to show you an example of the level of protection that Jscrambler offers, we’ll take a function of our game “Alien Kindergarten” and obfuscate it.

We can see that even after using JSbeautifier the code is quite difficult to understand. Besides site-locking they offer some interesting transformations such as dead code insertion (that’s why the obfuscated code is longer) and member enumeration.

Mission accomplished…. it looks like that doing the whole thing from scratch is much easier than attempting a reverse engineering.

Ahhhh! forgot to say that Jscrambler is optimized for games and doesn’t affect performance.

We are happy to announce we are working on a new Foot Chinko chapter.

It’s been a long time since the original game was launched and we were excited about the possibility of developing a new Foot Chinko game. During this time it seems that our little creature has been growing in popularity. Although the game was released over a year ago, enthusiastic players keep on uploading videos: Foot Chinko on youtube

Is it our imagination or does it look like searches on google for the keyword “foot chinko” are growing? Results on google trends

We are going to release an HTML5 exclusive version of the game for Spil Games. This version will feature the Eurocup 2016 and will include a couple of new mechanics.

We are also considering a native version of the game for iOS, Android and Windows phone using Unity. By combining the old game levels with the new ones, we could have almost 150 different levels, but the truth is, in this time we’ve learned so much about level design that designing a complete new set of levels is an interesting challenge.

So, what kind of publisher do you think would be a good partner for this adventure? We would love to hear your thoughts…

We’ve been using an html5 game engine called Phaser for over a year. It’s open source and was created by a photon storm.Our experiences with Phaser have been fantastic. We’ve tried several frameworks but found Phaser the best game engine to develop our games from the usability and performance points of view.Now Richard Davey, the man behind Phaser, has started a campaign to collect money to be able to dedicate more time enhancing his incredible framework.Please check this out:

As game development technology evolves, so do work methodologies. One of the up and coming ways of organizing work, used by an ever increasing number of studios, is scrum.

Scrum is an agile development method that allows for quick iteration and offers great adaptability to suit the needs of the project or any sudden setbacks. It mainly focuses on … getting a working game as soon as possible, and then improving upon it. As such, it can be an invaluable tool for studios wishing to save time otherwise spent redoing previous work all over.

And this is where Trello comes in. Trello presents itself as a board, accessible to all participants in the development process of a game, where tasks to be done get pinned for everyone to see. This allows everyone on the team to be up to date on what must be done, or what’s already been done, as well as swiftly assign new tasks.

There are no bosses in Trello: anyone can add their own cards and assign people to them, move them around, or edit existing ones to add extra info. For example, if a task requires certain assets, such as an image or a code snippet, you can add it so whoever is in charge can get it without needing a file transfer.

Typically, a Trello board is split into three sections: “To Do” – where tasks planned are stored and are assigned or picked up by different workers, “Doing” – for tasks currently in development or subject to change, and finally “Done” – for tasks completed and awaiting approval. Additionally, we make use of an extra column dedicated to bug reporting “Bugs :(“. This way, if anyone involved on the development finds a bug in the game, they can file a ticket immediately.

Another obvious advantage to Trello is knowing at any time who is working on what, avoiding unnecessary overlap due to poor communication between team members while also being able to gauge each worker’s workload at a simple glance.

All in all, Trello has become a must for our studio, and we encourage others to try and use it on their games, we are sure you’ll see an improvement!

http://www.ravalmatic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/trello_taco.jpg512512Javi Sanzhttp://www.ravalmatic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ravalmatic_logo.pngJavi Sanz2015-03-11 13:05:002016-10-10 22:58:32Using Trello in game development

Companies are always thriving in order to step up their performance, and every little bit helps. In fact, we are no different. Thus, we like to pick up proper tools, matching to our needs. And our last decision was to implement TexturePacker.

TexturePacker is a spritesheet building software. And the best at it, if you ask us. Why? May you ask. Well, there’s a lot say then. We’ve tested pretty much all other options, both browser based or native software, and we came to feel what makes it different.

First of all it’s fast. Ridiculously fast. It takes less than half a minute to just take all your sprites and convert them into a functional spritesheet. Moreover, it’s also easy. Default settings fit in most scenarios, which really helps with newcomer fellows. And this can be extrapolated to anyone who wants to start building spritesheets as well.

Then, it is a powerful tool too. It lets you save your spritesheets in a wide pool of over 40 supported data formats. We mainly use JSON files, as we work with HTML5, but it also supports the most popular frameworks, like Corona, Unity or Cocos2D. It really has a lot of options to toy with in search of the blending or look you’re after, be it with preloaded settings, or adjusting values one-by-one. Special mention to the “Reduce border artifacts” option that prevents halos from appearing in OpenGL, which we found utterly helpful.

To sum up, it’s continuously being updated, keeping up with all the frameworks it works with, preventing those pesky incompatibilities that happen from time to time and mess up your day.

And last but not least, it’s low priced. We like to see it this way: A lifetime license that includes one year of updates costs around 30€. Then you can add up more years of updates for the same price.

Summarizing, we invested in TexturePacker because it offers us ease of use and performance, at an affordable price for an indie studio.TexturePacker is available on www.codeandweb.com.

Loading time is critical on mobile html5games. Some optimizations can be achieved by reducing the size and the quantity of the assets to be uploaded without giving up quality.

We’ll describe some of the basic things that can be done to minimize loading time. They are quite standard, followed by most developers and include optimizations on these fronts:

Audio – Code – Graphics

AudioOur game Foot Chinko contains more than 30 audio effects, that’s a lot. We wrapped them in just 1 audio file with this open source application:Tõnis Tiigi Audio Sprite on github

The resulting file is called audio sprite. Size wasn’t reduced but the amount of assets indeed, and this helped a lot to keep loading time low.

Game Engine – codeWe are currently implementing Phaser for all our html5 games. Our cute Pocahontas Slots doesn’t make use of all the capabilities of this great and robust framework. It doesn’t need the physics module, for example. Instead of referencing this file in the index.html:

GraphicsChoose a good and unique resolution, all assets of your game will be dependent of this initial decision. We usually work with the iPad2 resolution, that is 1024 x 768 px. Our games look alright on desktop and devices with a big display without punishing players with smaller resolution devices.

A good program to generate them is Texture Packer. Once you’ve packed all the images into a texture atlas is time to compress the resulting png. We use an online tool called tinypng for that. This is the last step before releasing the production game.

In case you need a simple background image with a color gradient, for example, let’s say for the sky, generate a bitmap procedurally.

http://www.ravalmatic.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/loading_time.jpg512512Javi Sanzhttp://www.ravalmatic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ravalmatic_logo.pngJavi Sanz2014-11-09 18:46:002016-10-10 22:58:32It's time to optimize the loading time of html5 games